ABC analysis for salon inventory: what to count and what to let go

Third attempt. A spreadsheet with 340 rows, a free Sunday, a coffee. You got to row 90 somewhere around the second tub of foils, and the file has not been opened since.

If that sounds familiar, the problem was probably the list. Nobody can hold 340 products in steady attention every week, and a method that asks you to will lose to a busy month every time.

This article is about deciding which products deserve a number, which deserve a glance, and which you are allowed to stop counting altogether. It takes one afternoon, and the answer for most of your shelf will be a relief.

🪫 Why counting everything is why you stopped

A small salon carries hundreds of products and has one person's attention to spend on them. A count that treats a $9 box of gloves exactly like a $62 bottle of bond-building treatment spends that attention evenly, and it runs out long before the list does.

So the count gets skipped once, then twice, and by week three it has quietly stopped. That is how the method is built. It says nothing about how organized you are.

The fix is to spend attention unevenly, on purpose. Our guide to salon inventory management covers why any of this matters; this piece is about where to point the effort.

🧠 You are already doing this

Most owners already sort their stock by instinct, without a name for it. Four things come up again and again when salon owners describe how they really run their shelves:

• Color is built around the regulars. The shades your repeat clients need are always there; the rest gets filled in when a gap shows up.
• Whole categories get refused. Plenty of salons keep no vivids at all and special-order them for the client who asks.
• Fewer shades, more mixing. Carrying a tighter range on purpose and mixing to cover the gaps.
• A smaller line by choice. Picking a product line partly because its catalog is shorter, so the shelf never sprawls.

Every one of those is prioritization. In my experience the instinct is right about color and quietly wrong about one thing, and the method below fixes that one thing.

🔢 ABC analysis for salon inventory, run once

The method has a name outside beauty: ABC analysis. You rank every product by the money it moves in a year, then draw two lines.

Money moved in a year = units used in a year × what you pay for one.

Here it is on a short, salon-shaped list, at wholesale prices:

• Bond-building treatment, 16 oz: 24 a year × $62 = $1,488
• Lightener, 1 lb: 40 × $34 = $1,360
• Color 6N, 2 oz: 120 × $9 = $1,080
• Color 7N, 2 oz: 110 × $9 = $990
• 20 vol developer, 32 oz: 60 × $11 = $660
• Back bar shampoo, gallon: 12 × $48 = $576
• Toner 9V, 2 oz: 50 × $10 = $500
• Gloves, box of 100: 30 × $9 = $270
• Foil roll: 18 × $14 = $252
• Color 4RR, 2 oz: 12 × $9 = $108
• Applicator brushes, 10-pack: 10 × $8 = $80
• Vivid pink, 2 oz: 6 × $12 = $72

The twelve lines add up to $7,436. The top four move $4,918, about two thirds of the total. Those are your A items. The next three move another $1,736, about a quarter: the B items. The last five, almost half the list, move $782, around a tenth of the money: the C items.

You will often hear this as the 80/20 rule, or an 80/15/5 split. That is a general rule of thumb from inventory management, and nobody measured it on salons. On a real list of a few hundred products the top slice usually gets sharper, and where you draw the lines is your call. If you already keep the salon inventory spreadsheet template, the History tab has the units and the cost in one place, so the ranking takes an hour.

Money, though, only answers half the question.

⚠️ Where sorting by money goes wrong

Look at the bottom of that list again. Gloves and foil sit among the C items, next to a vivid pink that gets used six times a year. Rank by money alone and you would glance at gloves once a quarter.

Now picture a Saturday with no gloves. The color services stop. The vivid pink running out costs you one special order.

Hospitals hit exactly this problem and solved it with a second question. In a study of a 190-bed hospital's medical store, Gupta and colleagues in the Medical Journal Armed Forces India found that 14.4% of drugs took 70% of the spending, while 63.7% took just 10%. They then sorted the same drugs a second way, by how vital each one was to care, and set stock rules from both answers together.

The salon version is two questions per product:

• How much money does it move? (the ranking above)
• If it ran out right now, would a service stop?

What to do about the cheap items that stop the chair, mainly holding a little more of them, is covered in our piece on back bar inventory management.

🗂️ What to count weekly, monthly, and never again

Two questions give you four boxes, and each box gets its own rhythm:

Moves real money and stops a service. Lightener, 6N, 7N, developer, the 9V toner. Count these every time you count. These are the numbers you should always know.

Moves real money, doesn't stop a service. Bond-building treatment, back bar shampoo. Count monthly. They matter for cash, and a short gap will not empty a chair.

Moves little money, stops a service. Gloves, foil. Keep extra on hand and check them at every count. Over-holding them costs almost nothing, so buy generously and look briefly.

Moves little money, doesn't stop a service. 4RR, vivid pink, the brushes. Count rarely, or never again.

That is the whole schedule. How to run each count, from where to start to what to do with half-used bottles, is in our guide to how to do inventory in a salon.

✅ What "never again" actually means

For a large part of your shelf, the right answer is to buy it when the shelf looks low and stop carrying a number in your head. I would say that plainly to any owner who has quit counting three times.

Here is why it is allowed. If you get a bottom-box product wrong, the cost is a week or two of mild inconvenience and one quick order. If you insist on counting it forever, the cost is often the whole habit, because that is the row where people give up. Trading the first cost for the second is a good deal.

Suplery fits the same split. It drafts reorders from your counts, so after a couple of counts the products you keep counting get their orders built for you. The bottom box stays off the list, and you buy it by eye.

🔁 Re-run it, rarely

The boxes go stale slowly. A color gets popular, a trend dies, a service comes off the menu. Once or twice a year is enough to redo the ranking.

Two things are a signal to do it sooner: you added a new service line, or you switched a product line. Either one reshuffles the list overnight.

💵 Where the two ends of the list lead

The bottom of the ranking is where dead stock collects: the shade bought for one client in 2024, still on the shelf. The top of the ranking is where most of your cash sits at any moment. Both have their own pages. How much money is buried in your inventory looks at what that stock is worth, and how to cut inventory costs in a salon covers what to do about it.

Tracking the top boxes closely without adding an evening a week is what salon inventory management software is for.

💉 If you run a med-spa

The second question does most of the work here. Injectables land in the top box on both counts at once: they move serious money, and running out cancels a booked appointment. The shampoo in the same back room is a bottom-box item. Dated, high-value stock also has its own rules, covered in med spa expiry tracking.

🧡 Count less, and know more

The owners who keep an inventory habit tend to be the ones who stopped trying to count everything. Pick the products that matter, give them a fixed day, and let the rest go.

Suplery keeps the numbers for the products you care about. You enter each count from your phone, and after a couple of counts it sees how fast each product goes and drafts the reorder per supplier for you to approve.

👉 Start on Suplery

Which salon products are worth counting every week?

The ones that move the most money and would stop a service if they ran out. For most color salons that means lightener, developer and the shades your regulars use. Everything else can be counted less often, or not at all.

How often should each product be counted?

It depends on the product. The top box gets counted at every count, usually weekly. High-value items that won't stop a service can be counted monthly. Cheap items that stop the chair, like gloves and foil, get a quick look at every count. The rest can be reordered by eye.

What is ABC analysis in inventory?

A way to rank products by the money they move in a year: units used times what you pay for one. The top slice is A, the middle is B, the long tail is C. Hospitals and warehouses have used it for decades, and it works the same way on a salon shelf.

Is it okay to stop counting some products?

Yes. For low-cost products that won't stop a service, a missed reorder means a week or two of mild inconvenience and one quick order. Trying to count them forever often costs you the whole habit.

Which products should a salon stop carrying?

Start at the bottom of the ranking: shades bought for one client, lines you tried once, anything that has sat untouched for months. If a product is rarely used and easy to order, ordering it when a client asks frees up the shelf and the cash sitting on it.

Why do cheap products like gloves and foil need attention?

Running out of them stops services. A $9 box of gloves sits near the bottom of the money ranking, yet a Saturday without gloves stops every color service. Keep extra on hand. Over-holding them costs very little.

How often should I redo the ranking?

Once or twice a year. Do it sooner if you add a new service line or switch product lines, since either one reshuffles the list.

Does this work for a solo stylist or a one-room salon?

Yes, and it goes faster. The list is shorter, so the ranking takes less time, and the set of products worth counting every week is usually small enough to check in a few minutes.

How does this apply to a med-spa?

The second question carries more weight. Injectables land in the top box on both counts: they move serious money, and running out cancels a booked appointment. Dated, high-value stock also needs expiry tracking, which is its own job.